Leaks of private information about Verizon customers in chat transcripts

Verizon customers who regularly use the company’s online chat system to troubleshoot their service you might want to stop for now. A mistake is to disclose personal information (addresses, phone numbers and sometimes account numbers) in the chat windows of other customers.

Ars Technica discovered the leak on Monday, November 30 and alerted Verizon. As of this post, the leak has yet to be fully corrected, but the number of cases in which it occurs appears to have declined.

The leak also appears to only affect those who speak with a Verizon representative about whether Fios services are available in their area. For this process, customers would normally need to give Verizon representatives their full and complete address and, in some cases, their account number. According to Ars: “When the chat window opens, it contains transcripts of conversations other customers have had, whether current or potential.”

It is not known how long the leak has lasted, as some of the screenshots provided by Ars are several months old.

In a statement to Ars, Verizon said:

We are investigating an issue with our online chat system which helps people who check the availability of Fios services. We believe that a small number of users may have seen the name, phone number and / or address of a house or building of an unrelated person who had previously used this chat system to enter this information. Since the problem was reported to us, we have identified and isolated it and are working to resolve it as quickly as possible.

It is the last of a long a long list of big mistakes made by Verizon year. In February, Verizon, along with the other major mobile carriers, was only fined $ 48 million for illegally share your customers’ location data. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said at the time that Verizon has sold access to its customer information to companies that aggregate this type of data. In July, the National Advertising Division (NAD) said the version should stop cheating on your customers with claims that its 5G coverage was available nationwide. Telecommunications also strangled the Santa Clara County Fire Department’s allegedly “unlimited” data plan while Firefighters were trying to put out the blaze at the Mendocino complex.

in 2018. It doesn’t look good.

We will update this article after Verizon resolves the issue.